Living My Life in Plan B
The upside of getting lots of rejections is that
you have lots of material you can rework. If you write, large chunks
of you or life become works in progress, sometimes in the sixth
draft, often changing in a second after stagnating for months.
My first published story, "Running On Empty," sat
on a floppy disc for over two years because I hated my ending. When
I finally found a better one, I rewrote the story and sent it out in
about two days.
Another story gained nearly 20 rejections before
I decided that too many characters appeared in the opening scene so
readers had trouble keeping track of them. Trying to cut some of
them made things even worse, and the story languished for three
years until I heard about a novella contest and tried expanding the
early scenes so those characters appeared more gradually.
It worked. When the story grew from 7000 to
16,000 words in three days, I knew the muse was finally taking my
calls. "Stranglehold" won the Black Orchid Novella Award from the
Wolfe Pack and saw print last summer. Plan B to the Max.
That success also caused me a major headache. I
wrote the short story to follow the second novel in a series set in
Detroit, but the series never sold. None of the names I gave the PI
ever sounded right, so I kept changing them. The first novel-still
unsold-has dozens of rejections under at least three titles and
currently hibernates on a flash drive. Some day, I want to revise it
into a stand alone.
Why a stand alone? Because another stand alone
set in Connecticut got 70 rejections before I retired it. The
protagonist was Zach Barnes, and I liked the name well enough to
re-cycle it into the novella. When someone told me about a new
publisher who wanted mysteries set in Connecticut, I changed the
PI's name to Greg Nines (same rhythm as Zachary Barnes so I could do
a global edit without having to change anything else) and sent it
out again-with a new title.
Imagine my surprise when Who Wrote The Book of
Death? found a home. Now imagine my even greater shock when
reviewers and readers said they wanted to read more about Greg
Nines. It means Zach Barnes-the name I liked-is now stuck in the
unpublished limbo of Detroit.
I can't change his name back, so I'm working on
Plan C: moving two of those proposed Detroit novels to Connecticut,
where one of them actually looks like it will work better
anyway.
I'll bet lots of other writers can tell the same
story. Rejection doesn't have to mean "no." Sometimes, it just means
"not yet," so never throw anything away. Stick it on a flash drive
and give it a name you'll recognize next year. Trust me. Somewhere,
you have the minor character, the great dialogue exchange, or the
description of the crime scene that is perfect for your current WIP.
Pull it out and drop it in.
Remember that short story with a new ending? A
once loopy love story with a dozen rejections is now knocking on
doors as a mystery. Somebody wanted a comic mystery with a
particular theme, and this story had everything except a body count.
So I killed the girlfriend instead of winning her. Another story had
a title that gave away the ending. When I changed the title, it
suggested a different ending that I liked even better.
If you're a writer, your whole life is a work in
progress. Don't be afraid to keep making it better.
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